The First Time I Knew This Story Had to Be Told
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Writing the story inside me.
Gentle note to readers:
This reflection discusses childhood abuse, trauma, and the emotional and spiritual cost of telling difficult stories. These themes are approached with care and hope, but please read at your own pace.
When I first began writing What Remains After, I did so for practical reasons. I imagined it as a short piece, something that might introduce readers to my work and invite them into my broader writing life. That may not sound particularly inspired, but it’s honest. Still, once I sat down to write, something shifted. A quiet certainty settled in. This story needed to be told. Not dramatically or urgently, but insistently. It refused to remain small.
At first, it didn’t meet the expectations I had placed on it. It didn’t attract the attention or numbers I hoped for. Yet the act of writing brought healing and clarity I hadn’t anticipated. For a time, that felt like enough. Years later, a trusted friend read the story and saw what I could not yet fully see. She urged me to expand it, to treat it not as a private exercise but as a work meant to be shared. She found readers who did not know me, who had no reason to be generous, and their response was unanimous: this story mattered. It was not finished. It needed to reach beyond me.
I have long understood my writing as a calling, but callings rarely arrive with spectacle. They emerge quietly, through grief, compassion, and conviction that will not loosen its grip. For me, it was all three. As a survivor of childhood sexual and physical abuse, growing up in the 1980s, I carried stories that demanded attention. Writing What Remains After became a way of naming what had shaped me and of extending hope to others who might recognize themselves in its pages.
I wrestled with that sense of calling. I questioned it. I asked God if this was truly work He was asking of me. Then one morning, Isaiah’s words rose from the page: “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?” (Isaiah 6:8). I do not see myself as a prophet. I see myself as a woman entrusted with a task, called to offer what she has. The weight of that trust still humbles me.
Some stories pursue us. They do not ask permission. They linger until they are written. Years ago, while sorting through old diaries, I opened one from 1984 and encountered memories I would rather have left untouched. Another diary from years later reminded me that I was not alone, that others carried similar wounds. The idea of telling a story about a young girl navigating such trials would not release me. I prayed over it, resisted it, and finally recognized that refusing to write it would mean turning away from something God was pressing into my hands. Like the apostles who could not help but speak of what they had seen and heard (Acts 4:20), I could not keep silent.
Writing this story demanded more than craft. It required memory, honesty, and courage. I was afraid of what I might uncover, but even more afraid of what might happen if I looked away. Fear, I learned, was not a signal to stop. It was evidence that the work mattered. God’s promise in Joshua 1:9 became a lifeline: “Do not be afraid or discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go.” Obedience often begins with trembling.
Faith became the foundation of this work. Prayer, Scripture, and silence sustained me when the weight of the story felt too heavy. I asked God repeatedly whether I was writing what He intended, whether it honored Him, whether it was enough or too much. Writing redemptive fiction requires surrender. It means releasing control and perfectionism, trusting God to shape what we cannot. “Trust in the Lord with all your heart,” Proverbs reminds us, “and He will make straight your paths” (Proverbs 3:5–6).
I am grateful for readers who wait not just for What Remains After, but for truth told gently and with grace. Storytelling, at its best, becomes a shared act of faith. The writer offers the story. The reader receives it with openness. In that exchange, obedience and art are no longer opposites. They become forms of worship.
Some stories are not invented. They are entrusted. I believe What Remains After was entrusted to me. When God gives a story, He also provides the courage to tell it. Writing it required bravery. Sharing it requires even more. But God asks only for willingness. Only for a yes.
This space exists for stories that are carried before they are written, for obedience that unfolds quietly, and for courage that grows through faith.
If you have ever been entrusted with something that frightened you and changed you at the same time, you already understand this kind of calling.
Stories of Consequence
Fiction that faces the dark, but ends in light.
May God bless you richly,
Pauline J. Grabia
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When I first began writing What Remains After, I did so for practical reasons. I imagined it as a short piece, something that might introduce readers to my work and invite them into my broader writing life. That may not sound particularly inspired, but it’s honest. Still, once I sat down to write, something shifted. A quiet certainty settled in. This story needed to be told. Not dramatically or urgently, but insistently. It refused to remain small.